With courage, towards a different future

A wit wryly defined democracy as ‘a rumour not yet disproved’. In our time, that’s indeed the case — in Chile, Russia, Nigeria, Egypt, the US, not to forget, our own country.

There has been a great surge in anti-democratic sentiment all over the world. Left-leaning thinkers explain this as the capture of the State by the Corporation. Gandhians see it as a predictable consequence of unchecked greed. For neo-liberals, this is a clash between technocratic ethics (i.e., ‘transparency’ and ‘fast growth’) and a political order prone to ‘populist’ economic drives.

There are other explanations that underline the deviant personality traits of individuals leading nations. But why is democracy falling apart in so many countries and why all together?

The Spanish American philosopher-poet George Santayana (1863–1952) had once spoken of the world being ‘on a moral holiday’; on those lines, one can probably say the world today appears to be ‘on a political holiday’.

In a democracy, the ideal is a maximal representation of the wishes of the people; but the processes institutionalised to realise the ideal keep sliding off the ideal. In India, we have seen this happening in the SIR exercise, which has unfolded as a tyranny of the State over those who constitute the nation. As the gap increases between the ideal and the mechanism created to attain it, representation gets replaced by domination of the people by the State. Empty rituals replace the relationship between the people and their representatives.

It may seem logical that if these rituals are unmasked, debunked and somehow made irrelevant, society can be pushed back to its original arrangement. But that logic is flawed, for assaults on the rituals of representation can weaken the rituals as well as the ideal they embody. That is to say, assaults on the rituals of democracy wound democracy itself. And recovering/ reclaiming the ideal is not possible by simply addressing deviations but by reasserting the original idea.

So, civil society must do more than expose the aberrations, it must re-articulate the dream; not simply hope to sweep away devious rituals but lift people’s vision to newer and higher horizons of expectations.

This task is different from the task Marx had assigned the class capable of becoming society’s critical consciousness. In fact, the task cannot be performed by a class; it can only be performed by individuals who refuse to belong to any class.

The reinvention of democracy needs public intellectuals who can place themselves outside class, race, gender and, most importantly, the momentary rush of the events of the day. To overcome the challenges we face today, citizens must show a high degree of moral courage and fearlessness. Those who value democracy should know that no price is too high to pay to keep the ideal alive.

When South African law ruled that all non-Christian marriages were invalid, Kasturba Gandhi stepped forward and led the first-ever women’s resistance group to cross the Transvaal border on 15 September 1913. She was not afraid of going to jail. Her fearless resolve led to the withdrawal of the discriminatory law.

Are citizens who desire to reclaim the ideal of democracy in India or elsewhere ready to lose their fear of jail? Can we return from our political holiday, to unmask the system and free India of the hollow rituals that have replaced its democracy?

****

We must also understand that even if it were revived, our democracy cannot be returned to its old state; it will never be an exact replica of what it has been in the past. It needs to be sensitive to the big changes taking place in the world. Humans have to come to terms with artificial intelligence and with non-human life on our planet.

We must rethink the idea of democracy as an integral part of the world, the planet and even the cosmos — what is now articulated as the imaginary of ‘cosmo-democracy’. It is time for us to think of rights beyond the rights of a majority, or adults or even just humans.

We need to find ways of respecting and protecting the rights of all marginal communities, all minorities, children, and non-human lifeforms known to us. We need a more expansive vision that accommodates worlds that may come to be in the near future and a more expansive sense of rights.

Our world faces threats from new viruses, dramatic environmental changes, artificial intelligence, and no less from human indifference towards nature and the suffering of fellow humans and our insensitivity to the signs of planetary degeneration.

The wars humans have to fight in the near future are unprecedented. The wars we fought in the beginning of the second millennium were mostly faith-based crusades or jihads; in the nineteenth century, they were nationalistic, based on ethnicity, language or territorial claims; in the twentieth, driven by ideologies combined with economic interests, whether caused by fascism, communism or capitalism.

The wars on the horizon will be for or with the environment, with the forces of natural evolution, with non-human intelligence and with life and objects that belong to a different framework of matter and motion. Sadly, governments across the world have an old-world mindset; they are prisoners of terribly dated political ideologies focused on faith-based divisions, territorial contestations and narrow nationalism.

Even discussions about the emergence of a new world order follow old paradigms, and people opposed to autocratic regimes seem immersed in a wishful longing for some bygone era. We need to imagine a different future, a new form of democracy, a form of government with the sensitivity-bandwidth to visualise a global community of all life-forms, humans as well as man-made intelligence. The clock is ticking.